My purpose was not:
1. To improve learning and teaching or,
2. Determine which medium is best for which outcome, or
3. To make life less complicated for professors of educational technology.
but to ascertain TRUTH!!!
I had reason to believe Clark's hypothesis was wrong and I wanted to test that belief.
However, some practical implications can be drawn from my results.
1. Present factual information in a "printed" form rather than an audio recording.
2. If you must use a recording, be aware that students will find information presented in that medium harder to remember, so modify the text to make it more memorable.
[quoting Reinhart, 20 Oct 96] I have the same concerns as Jeff. Who were the 36 undergraduate students in teacher training? It's implied from the paper that the students were from the University of Aizu in Japan where Steve teaches.
Sorry. The data was collected at an American university. The text was in English and the students were all native speakers of English.
If this is the case then the students are not "average" students, because the University of Aizu is a university that specializes in computer science and engineering.
Irrelevant. Clark's hypothesis is not about "average" students. It is about all students.
[quoting Brack, 20 Oct 96] I think that many of the "media is not important" findings are truly confounded...
At the same time, any attempt to present exactly the same information via two media is difficult. For example, Steve tries to equalize the written and oral presentation of information by setting times and computer interfaces. However, as mentioned above, a lot of information can be provided by the way a speaker speaks--the tone and inflection, masculine or feminine voice, etc. Even the removal of tone and inflection (through computer synthesis) provides its own information content!
I concede this, but I believe this is trouble for Clark. If you present something by teacher and also by TV, there are possible confounds. For example, the figure on the screen is smaller than the human. The distance from the learner to the teacher may be greater (or less) than the distance to the TV. When you change media these kinds of things always creep in. If this is true, and you deem these relevant to the question, then I assert that Clark's hypothesis is not testable. An untestable hypothesis is an unscientific hypothesis. Thus I win either way. Either Clark's hypothesis is testable and the results of my experiment show it is wrong, or it is unscientific and it must be abandoned.
[quoting Nissen, 19 Oct 96] In reply to Steve Tripp's compelling paper, I have no argument with his study or findings. Rather I find myself asking, "Why?"
If students really do learn better or retain more from reading the printed word, might it have something to do with the processes of encoding and decoding information?
The simple answer is that I have no idea what the underlying mechanism might be. But that doesn't stop science. There is no theory of the underlying mechanism of gravity, either.
From a Darwinian viewpoint my results are a little surprising. Human have a genetically derived ability to hear sounds as words and sentences and assign meanings to these. This ability presumably evolved about 200,000 years ago. It took a long time before humans realized they could write down sounds and words and read them. In many ways, reading and writing are extremely unnatural, in the sense that they are inventions, not genetic mutations. So it is surprising that the unnatural medium is "better" than the natural medium.
It may be that the visual cortex is more "powerful" than the audio processing areas of the brain or something, but this is pure speculation, and I have no special insights.
[quoting Oliver, 20 Oct 96] What his experiment did was to compare learning by reading text with learning by listening. This is not to compare media as such but to compare sensory inputs to the subjects, visual with audio.
I don't understand this. You are saying that the same content presented by tape recording and by paper text are NOT delivered by different media? What do we mean when we say "multimedia?" I discussed the fact that Clark did not define media in his original article. But I assumed he had some "commonsense" definition in mind. If I follow your argument correctly, you are saying that Clark's hypothesis does NOT apply to comparisons between, say, TV and written text. Thus there may very well be differences between TV and written text which influence learning and Clark does NOT rule that out? Yipes!!!
(He could, for example, have compared two different media more objectively by offering the same text on screen and on paper.)
Objectively?
That's OK as he chooses to define "media" in this way,...
Doesn't everyone define media this way?
...but leads to further complications. By using differing sensory inputs, he introduces extra variables.
Precisely. That's why media influence learning.
In the extreme, a blind person would learn better from audio, a deaf person by reading.
Right. Genetic endowments make a difference. And all of us (on average) have limited genetic endowments which make it easier for us to remember things we read than things we hear. (I assume.)
Did he make any effort to establish the relative visual and auditory capabilities of the subjects?
Reading ability may be a factor. His subjects were undergraduates, whose reading ability would probably be well above average.
All this is neutralized by randomization of subjects, as we all know. If you think my subjects were not sufficiently randomized, what about Furnham and Gunter's?
Running the same experiment with a group of poor readers would have perhaps produced the opposite result.
So what? Clark's hypothesis is not about good or poor readers.
To support such a bald conclusion that "media influence learning" I would want to see a much more representative group of subjects drawn from the population at large, with a range of reading abilities.
Why? Clark's hypothesis is not about "representative groups."
Looking and listening are not necessarily independent. So, when looking at the screen, what were the subjects listening to? When listening to the audio, what were the subjects looking at?
Irrelevant. Clark's hypothesis is not about things like this. It states baldly that media do not influence learning.
Finally, how were the post-tests delivered? Print? Screen? Audio?
Irrelevant, but the test was paper and pencil. Clark's hypothesis is not about the form of the post-test.
I suppose what I'm suggesting is that the experiment had only limited control of the variables inherent in the subject population.
This experiment replicated Furnham and Gunter's findings over widely separated populations. Randomization of subjects takes care of this objection.